what else can capitalism become, especially without extremely strict regulation and wealth/income caps- all things these people are against? and to the extent that the state has its hand in the economy, is it not ONLY to benefit corporations? they’re not regulating these companies or anything to any meaningful degree. so if the government is bad because they only serve big business, even in their own completely nonsensical analysis, doesnt that still make capitalism the problem?

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[–] Dirt_Possum@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think you might be a little off here. I really appreciate that you brought up Ernst Mandel's and Fredric Jameson's works, but I have to disagree about them not intending the word "late" to mean "closer to the terminal end." Without going and spending a bunch of time digging for quotes, it seemed pretty clear to me that they were referring to the concept that there are certain stages to capitalism (as already noted both Marx and Lenin discussed) and not using the word just to mean "the most recent" not to mention that would be an odd way to phrase it. I also agree with you that Michael Hudson (and slightly more tangentially Edward Said) have further developed the concept of modern imperialism beyond Lenin's analysis, but that said, Lenin's conception of imperialism was not at all vulgar, not even in comparison to modern Marxists additions to it. Have you read Lenin's work on imperialism? He specifically developed it beyond the idea of "naked territory grabbing and domination" of old school colonialism to mean what it means today, including how Hudson mean and use it.

Capitalism will not die of its own accord, it must be killed.

Distinction without a difference. Capitalism will be killed because of its own inherent contradictions which make its killing an inevitability.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

I have read Lenin, and yes it's a bit more complicated since he does talk about financial imperialism but not in the same way things have developed post war. Also this is Jameson, in the introduction, describing his choice of "late."

What 'late' generally conveys is... the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.

And Mandel on "late":

... will enable us to explain THE history of the capitalist mode of production and above all the THIRD phase of this mode OF production, which we shall call late capitalism', (page 42)

Neither of these convey the idea that this is the last stage or a terminal stage, just another, most recent stage. And indeed Mandel does try and claim late capitalism is different than the imperialism described by Lenin, writing

the structure of the world economy in the first phase of late capitalism is distinguished by several important characteristics from its structure in the age of classical imperialism. (page 69)